Have you ever felt trapped inside your own body?
Answer:
I think I may know what you're talking about. I have wondered if I was a real person and how anyone could possibly know for sure. And there have been times when I felt like I didn't want to be myself. Like I wanted to be anyone else.
Some of this sounds as if it could be some of the symptoms of derealization and/or depersonalization. You may want to look up Dissociation. Dissociation happens to everyone at some level. You can find lots of information at www.webMD.com on all of these things. Hope this helps. I have similar symptoms and have all my life but it also has to do with my diagnosis.
Hopeful is correct that beyond some threshold this is called depersonalization, which can be a symptom of a lot of things psychiatric or even temporal lobe seizures or a prodrome to migraine.
I wanted to add that I have a memory from childhood of the first time it hit me hard that everyone else has a consciousness like I do, that everyone else sees the world from behind their eyes like I do, and is trapped within their body as I am, dependent on it as I am to represent myself to everyone else and to exist at all. I don't actually remember the first time I thought that. It's more of a memory of a memory of a memory for whenever I could first remember that, as it kept coming back to me when people talked about spirituality or the brain.
This is a rather profound thing as an intellectual experience as one can see when neuroscientists or others talk about consciousness, if they don't abandon the wonder of the thing for whatever words they think explain it. It's not depersonalization to get caught up in that. Depersonalization is rather purely a feeling of myself not being real. If the feeling is that my surroundings aren't real, that they're strangely distant without looking different, that's called derealization. It's when such feelings persist that they are psychiatric symptoms, not when they are a minor accompaniment to an intellectual exploration of what my consciousness is.
Sometimes I wonder if being able to step back and explore things like this aspect of existence, how we are each only in touch with the real world indirectly through our bodies, didn't just help me be a scientist, but also helped me to be bipolar. It's going to be a while before anyone knows anything about that, but people have been exploring the mystical side of what your asking for a long time. There's no one right answer from that except to say we are all indeed experiencing the real world indirectly.
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